The Return (2016) by Hisham Matar

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century: New York Times

The Return (2016)

by Hisham Matar

#89

  Exploring the non-fiction selections on the New York Times recent 100 Best Books of the 21st Century has been a real pleasure and a good break from fiction.  The fiction portion, on the other hand, fills me with a vague dread mostly because the titles I haven't read on that part of the list represent conscious decisions rather than a lack of familiarity.   It's almost all domestic fiction and there is just only so much of that I can take in a given time period, which is currently filled by the prevalence of the same genre on the 1,001 Novels: A Library fo America list.   It took me awhile to make it to The Return, the non-fiction work by novelist Matar about his decades long quest to obtain closure regarding the whereabouts of his Dad, who was kidnapped out of Egypt by the Quaddaffi regime and held for years at a nightmarish Libyan prison.

  This is the only non-fiction title on the 100 Best Books List to not have an Audiobook edition available via the library app so I read the hard copy on my Kindle.   The Return is both a coming-of-age book about the author, a family biography and a history for a place- Libya- that is poorly documented.  For example, this book was the first I'd heard of the Italo-Turkic war between the Italians and the Ottoman Turks before World War I.  It's important to Libya because it marks the beginning of the Italian colonial period.   Matar keeps the book moving along- 272 pages is sufficient to tell a story that could have been at least three separate books.  Not surprising that it was a Pulitzer Prize winner after it was released.

Seaweed Chronicles (2018) by Susan Hand Shetterly

 Book Review

Seaweed Chronicles (2018)

by Susan Hand Shetterly

  I bought this book at an independent bookstore in Castine, Maine, several years back on vacation and read it this year, also on vacation.  Seaweed Chronicles is a great example of what I call "New Yorker lit" or books that seem like a New Yorker feature extended to book length.  Here, the subject is seaweed, its uses and (potential) abuses, written from a variety of perspectives of people who live on the coast of Maine.   It starts out from the perspective one might expect: efforts by locals and multi-national corporations to harvest what might seem like a limitless resource.  Seaweed is a valuable commodity, though not a monolithic one, as I learned from Seaweed Chronicles there are several different types of seaweed, depending on where you are.  

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2010) by Tony Judt

 Audiobook Review

Postwar (2010)

by Tony Judt

  Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 was itself published in 2010, which puts it on the edge of being out-of-date, but I couldn't turn down the opportunity to listen to the 40 hours plus Audiobook.  It took me months, because like many titles in the LA public library system, they have one or two permanent copies of many titles, and you have to wait months between check-outs.  I'm not complaining about it, just saying it happens with longer books.  At one point I had thought that the book blog aspect of this endeavor would be focused on history, not fiction/literature, but there is a real lack of content, as the kids would say.  Cutting edge history is the domain of for-pay journals or graduate student work that isn't published.  Popular history in the United States basically means books about "the wars" (Revolutionary, Civil, World I, World War II, Vietnam) or "the presidents."   Leading writers of popular history in the US would have to include Bill O'Reilly, again, not complaining, just describing the market for history books in this country.

   Subjects that fall outside those two categories are few and far between.  I use the Bancroft Prize, which focuses on the Americas, and the Pulitzer for proxies on history books that are making the scene, but for subjects outside the US, it is even worse, in terms of supply.  Thus, Postwar, despite or perhaps because of its length, is a rare treat, a contemporary work of popular history about a subject that isn't America based (although the US does pop up relentlessly in the context of the subject), writing about areas (Central, Eastern, Southern Europe) that I don't here much about on a day-to-day basis.   In print, Postwar is 960 pages long, and I feel like that wouldn't include an index let alone footnotes.  Maybe an Index.   Judt starts at the end of World War II and methodically works his way forward, area by area, using contemporary, specialist sources to write a book for generalists (although, 960 pages calls that term into question). 

  Were it not for the Audiobook, I'm quite sure I would have never read  Postwar in print, if only because, closing in on turning 50, I believe that physically reading a book over 500 pages, in paperback or hardback, is a real ordeal.

    Trying to say anything about Postwar is tough because the subject is so large- like reading a book called History and then being asked to describe it.   The major trend is the rise and fall of Communism, though Judt's major contribution to this subject matter is combining that more familiar story with the first chapter of the European Union story.    The cut-off point in time leaves the reader wondering whether the accession of Eastern and Central European states will prove a success, and with the Ukranian conflict not even on the horizon. 

   I guess, the parts I found most relevant to the present situation were the chapters about the rise of post-communist populist/nationalist movements in central, southern and eastern Europe.  Postwar cuts off too soon to cover Brexit, and Le Pen makes a brief, late appearance, but the stuff about the split between the Czechs and the Slovaks, the situation in Hungary- where Victor Orban appears as a rabble-rouser, not yet in power and the conflict in the former Yugoslavia all gave me pause.   Another theme, or rather, absence of a theme, is any premonition that Ukraine and Russia would begin a now decade long war over...?.?>? only four years after the publication date.

  With the benefit of reading Postwar I would now argue that the war was precipitated by the eastern reach of the E.U., and Russia's feelings about that vis a vis Ukraine, which for many is considered a part of Russia and whose independence movement is fraught with Nazi's, Neo-Nazi's and the far right.  I could go on. 

Native Nation (2024) by Kathleen DuVal

 Audiobook Review

Native Nation (2024)

by Kathleen DuVal

  I like my history books like I like my coffee... magisterial.  Native Nations won a Pulitzer Prize last year, which is why I looked up the Audiobook on the library app and checked it out.  The Audiobook version clocks in at over 20 hours, and it look me a couple of check-outs and months of waiting in between to finish up, but it really is a great gloss on the history of the Native People in North America.  DuVal's major scholarly achievement is blending part of the argument made David Graeber in The Dawn of Everything, where Graeber, drawing on other scholars, argued for the historical choices made by allegedly non historical peoples (pre contact Native Americans) and essentially postulated that the "contemporary" Native American political scene when the Europeans showed up was the result of a centuries old rebellion against the Cahokia regime in the area of modern day St. Louis, and a similar rebellion in a similar time frame against a different group.   The idea is that the Native American who made contact with Europeans were not ignorant savages, but a collection of peoples who had rejected the kind of hierarchy and consolidation that won the day in the "old world" lands of Europe and Asia. 

    Graeber offers this analysis mostly as a theory, but DuVal fills in that gap with actual chapters from actual Native American history- she goes all over the map, with particular highlights coming from the Southeast and Southwest.   If you read Graeber, and are looking to follow up his Native American supported arguments, this Pulitzer Prize winning history book is worth reading.

The Power Broker (1974) by Robert A. Caro

 Audiobook Review

The Power Broker (1974)

by Robert A. Caro

   Clocking in at over 60 hours, the three volume Audiobook edition of Robert A. Caro's seminal masterpiece, The Power Broker, a comprehensive biography of New York park-and-freeway man Robert Moses, is certainly one of the most epic Audiobooks I've ever heard.   The Audiobook is broken into three volumes; each volume is a little over 20 hours long.   I wrote a review for the first volume back in September of last year.  Volume two didn't get the break-out treatment because, like many Volume 2's in a three-volume set, it didn't seem like it warranted a stand-alone post.   Roughly speaking, volume 1 is his rise, volume 2 is his hey-day and volume 3 is his decline and fall.  Reader, what does it tell you that I couldn't wait for the fall, and the last ten hours of the third volume was my favorite piece of the entire endeavor. 

  I was reflecting on The Power Broker, and Caro's achievement, during a recent trip to the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin Texas (thanks Dad!) Caro has famously been trying to finish the fifth volume of his LBJ biography for years- the last update was in 2023 after his longtime publisher Robert Gottlieb died.   Both Moses and LBJ symbolize a very specific type of 20th century man, the non-ideological Government guy who saw the rise of big government as an opportunity to obtain the specific type of success both craved.   One of the ironies that plays out again and again over the cours of all three volumes of The Power Broker is that Moses, the ultimate public servant, held the actual voting public in the kind of contempt one associates with modern day plutocrats like Peter Thiel.    He did not brook criticism or compromise, which is astonishing for a man who spent his professional career rooting up large parts of New York City, displacing thousands, and rebuilding it in his image (parks and freeways to get to those parks). 

  His path to power was unique to the rise of big government in the 20th century, he was able to master the internal bureaucracy of New York state and city- serving as the head of the Tri Borough Bridge Commission in addition to a dozen over entities in his prime AND he served as the link between New York and Federal freeway fund.  If he was outmaneuvered at the state level, he could shut off the funding at the federal level, and his opponents knew it.

  Ultimately, he was only bested by two men, one he survived and the other who ended him.  The first was Franklin Roosevelt, who first encountered Robert Moses when he was the Governor of New York and Moses was in his early, progressive phase associated with his parks era.  Roosevelt owed nothing of his rise to Moses, and was secure enough in his power not to be cowed by the others backroom machinations.  A final showdown wasn't required because Roosevelt went to Washington DC, and spending on public works became a preferred path out of the recession, and Moses was a position to spend more of that money than anyone else in the country, so they needed each other and that was enugh.

   The other, Nelson Rockefeller, spelled the end for Moses, who was in his late 70's and early 80's when Rockefeller appeared on the scene.  As spelled out by Caro, the enduring key to Moses' unassailability within the New York state and city bureaucracy was as the counterparty for all the bond that the state had issued via his various positions.  Basically, you couldn't do anything to Moses because the bond holders viewed it as tampering with their bonds.  Fortunately, the largest holder of those bonds was the brother of Nelson Rockefeller, so he could do whatever he wanted to Moses and the bondholders wouldn't do shit to stop him.

Published 9/11/24

Audiobook Review

The Power Broker: Volume 1 (1974)

Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

by Robert Caro

Read by Robertson Dean

(2011)

   Lists like the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America and 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die commonly keep fiction and non-fiction books separate.  For example, in the two lists I just cited, there are zero works of non fiction.  At least with the 1,001 Novels project the bias is in the title, but the 1,001 Books list has no excuse.   One recent list to buck this separation is the recently published New York Times Top Books of the 21st Century, which combines fiction and non-fiction.   Such an approach might have benefited the 1,001 Novels project.   You can see why if you listen to the Audiobook of The Power Broker: Volume 1, which is just about as New York a book as one could possibly imagine.  Indeed, there is an argument that its inclusion is required if a reader wants to really know New York, city and state.  No single person has had a greater impact on how the entire state LOOKS than Moses.   

  Volume 1, which lasts 22 hours in Audiobook format, handles his rise, and takes us to the cusp of his monumental bridge, tunnel and freeway building projects that remade Manhattan in his image.  We learn that Moses came from a patrician upbringing- a key element of his success is that he never needed to make money from his work and that his vision was inspired by the idea of a non-partial bureaucratic technocrat, who overcame all obstacles to benefit "the people."  Caro presents it as an idea he came up with while he was doing post-graduate studies in Oxford University, and his school-child dreams of a core of highly disciplined, uncorruptible state employees was about as far from the facts on the ground in New York City as could be possible.

   After some early career missteps, he was rescued from obscurity by a friendship with Belle Moskowitz, a reformer and early supporter of future Governor of New York Al Smith.  Moskowitz recommended Robert Moses to Smith as a man who could get things done, as someone who could help Smith implement the progressive ideas he wanted to advance to distance himself from the Tammany Hall political machine from which he sprang and get him in the running for a run at President.  Smith and Moses were an odd couple to be sure, and the depiction of their friendship is the unquestionable highlight of the book.   

   In Volume 1, most of the action is stage setting, as Moses begins to develop his vision of parks and freeways to drive to those parks.  Most of the action takes place on the tip of Long Island, where Moses spent the 20's and 30's in endless litigation with the land barons who owned all the property out there.  Parks were really popular with the general public and the press, particularly when those standing in the way are wealthy captain of industry.  It's clear both from the action of the book and Caro's relentless foreshadowing that the combination of power and lack of public accountability would turn Moses into a monster, but by the end of Volume 1 that moment is still on the far-ish horizon.

Random Family (2003) by Adrian LeBlanc

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times)

Random Family (2003)

by Adrian LeBlanc

#25

       This might be THE most representative book from the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list, a 432 page in depth exploration of the life and times of a loosely related group of New Yorkers who are knee deep in the crack epidemic.  You've got Coco Rodriguez, the main character, a woman who manages to have four children by three different men in between the ages of 17 and 24.  You've got Jessica Martinez, the consort of a notorious crack kingpin who is sentenced to life in Federal Prison during the book, and who herself serves a ten year federal prison sentence over the course of Random Family.  You've got Coco and Jessica's respective families, who are equally filled with child sexual abuse, drug usage, child neglect and early/frequent exposure to domestic violence.

   As someone who deals with individuals who are enmeshed with the Federal Criminal Justice system because of their participation in drug trafficking, I am well familiar with the social milieus that produce the characters in this book, and everything that they say or do was familiar to me- listening to the Audiobook of Random Family was like listening to a 20 hour federal probation report, where probation officers try to get to the heart of the same questions that LeBlanc frames in 15 pages instead of 400.

   A common theme, both in Random Family and my own professional experience, is disordered living.  A one parent household headed by Mom, or a serial household with Mom and a succession of partner's, is common.  It's been my own observation, borne out at length in Random Family, is that people who get into organized criminal activity do it because a) they never think it will end up with them serving decade long prison sentences b) they literally do not have a single other idea about what do besides crime. The men in this book, most of whom spend the entirety of the book in Federal or State Prison make these decisions when they are very young and even as they spend their ten, twenty year or life in prison sentences, the level of self-reflection is minimal because there were never any other choices to be made.

  The women on the other hand, again, based both on the experiences depicted in Random Family and my own professional experiences, is that women often believe that the only thing they have to offer is their body and that a child is their best chance of forging a lasting relationship with a providing male. When this inevitably fails to happen, the man disappears, and the woman is left with the child.  Coco, at the center of this book, is incapable of making a reasoned decision or really even looking after her own interesting, rather she is buffeted by the day-to-day chaos of the consequences of her decision to have four children with three different men.

  Coco is, in a sense, amazing in that she manages to keep her tattered family together through the entire book.  Jessica, on the other hand, manages to get impregnated by a guard while in prison and foists the children off on her long-suffering mother, also caring for some of her other children which she left behind to serve her decade long prison sentence.   The men are equally despicable and pathetic, the tattered flotsam of late-stage capitalism, going nowhere and doing nothing.  What, one wonders, is the end game for anyone in Random Family, except as a burden to the state and incubator of intergenerational trauma.   Those looking for answers will find none here and the author doesn't bother to try- it's not that type of book.

  

     

Say Nothing(2018) by Patrick Radden Keefe

 The Top 100 Books of the 21st Century: New York Times

Say Nothing: 

A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018)

by Patrick Radden Keefe

#19

   I visited Belfast over the Christmas/New Years Holiday period last year.  While I was there, I took a "black cab" tour where a local takes you on a tour of both sides of Belfast- Catholic and Protestant.   You see plenty of murals, and it's clear that conflict by proxy continues- the Catholic side is filled with Palestinian flags and the Protestant side with Israeli flags.  Keefe's account of the "troubles" which is a period in Northern Ireland history that generally corresponds to the time between the 1960's and the dawn of the Good Friday agreement signed in 1998,  has been hailed as a classic, and its inclusion on the Top 100 Books of the 21st Century- I think as the only non-American history book on the list... and the recent Hulu television version.

   I listened to the Audio book, and it works well in that format, since much of the writing seems to come from transcribed interviews.  The major narrative thrust beyond documenting the historical facts involved (from the perspective of the Catholic side) involves the fate of a handful of "disappeared" including a single mother of seven children- Keefe's desire to "solve" these disappearances is the tension-inducing narrative device that elevates Say Nothing above an ambitious oral history.

Far From the Tree (2012) by Andrew Solomon

 New York Times 

100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Far From the Tree (2012)

by Andrew Solomon

#67

  This is a 41 hour Audiobook.  I have been trying to get through it since November 20th of last year.  I finally finished a couple days.  Four separate check-outs.  Truly a beast of an Audiobook and depressing as hell, but I totally get while it was included.  Solomon, known for his journalism and his memoir about depression tackles this project charting societal attitudes towards "children who are different than their parents" with characteristic ambition.  Each chapter was an average of eight hours.  He covers deafness, dwarfs. down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, disability, prodigies, rape, criminals and transgenders with book-ending chapters about his own experience growing up gay and later experience as a gay dad of a very modern family.

  As Solomon repeatedly acknowledges, his sample is limited by parents of these different sorts of children and the children themselves who want to sit down to extensive interviews with a nosy journalist asking all sorts of extremely private questions.  Solomon is right on top of his major theme: Which is that even allowing for the need of humans to find meaning in cruel fate, parents of these children are by in large grateful for their experience.   One group that was noticeably, noticeably absent from every single chapter of this book was any input from the "normal" siblings of the subjects of this book.  As one of those siblings, and a reader of this book, I was astonished how every chapter featured the parents DESCRIBING how the normal siblings felt or what they thought they felt, but that almost none of them actually were asked anything.

   One of the justifications, traditionally, for warehousing children in these various categories was that it would have a negative impact on the "normal" siblings, which means that in each chapter that viewpoint is explicitly ruled out and ignored.  In some chapters it makes sense- I would hope and expect the hearing and normal sized siblings of the deaf and dwarves would be able to make a go of it.  The next four chapters: down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia and disability- which means basically vegetables, could have used some perspectives from the children in these families who have to watch their parent's lives irrevocably altered and generally ruined.  Of course, the parents can and do need to come to terms with it, but I would have liked to hear how out that ceaseless attention impacted the later lives of the siblings.

   The chapter on Prodigies is a clear outlier in that Prodigies carries a positive connotation, but paradoxically this is the one chapter where the parents often come off as manipulative and selfish. The last three chapters- rape, criminals and transgender were almost impossibly cruel in their details.  I think actually the transgender chapter was the hardest of all- hearing from parents who'd had their whole world destroyed because they lived in a small town and had a child who decided He wanted to be a She at a young age.  Published in 2012, I was still frequently shocked by the treatment experienced by the transgender families with young kids.  I certainly won't forget Far From the Tree.

The Argonauts (2015) by Maggie Nelson

100 Best Books of the 21st Century- New York Times

The Argonauts (2015)

by Maggie Nelson

#45

  The Non-fiction portion of the New York Times 1001 Best Books of the 21st Century list should be subtitled, "How the Left Lost the Culture War," because all of these titles celebrate and draw attention to diversity, and different types of diversity, and it is exactly what the right is targeting when the eliminate "DEI" initiatives.   I've written on this blog about the importance I place on diversity and different viewpoints, and while I personally adhere to that view, it's also hard not to see things from the other side, particularly since the other side is in power and is doing whatever they want in that department.

   And of course, Maggie Nelson, is no doubt appalled beyond belief by Trump and Trumpism, although there are elements of her reference points which might suggest a post-modern-like joy at the bare face of evil power as it relates to issues like transgenderism and queerness generally.  At the same time, Nelson: a queer, sex positive lesbian in a relationship with a f2m/genderfluid artist (Harry Dodge), writing a book about motherhood and sexuality, is like, exhibit "A" in what the right has SUCCESFULLY critiqued about the left. 

  I imagine a member of the MAGA movement would read three pages of The Argonauts and as dismiss it as deviant trash, and it is the book that the New York Times represents as the 45th best book of this century.  Good for Nelson, Good for the Times, bad for the left and bad for the electoral potential of the Democrats in the middle of the 21st century.

Cold Crematorium (2023) by József Debreczeni

 Audiobook Review

Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (2023)

by József Debreczeni

   This Holocaust memoir written by a Hungarian-Jewish author about his time in Auschwitz wasn't translated into English until 2023.  Since then it's garnered interest and acclaim, and when I heard about it late last year I immediately put the Audiobook onto my Libby Audiobook Library App.  The Hungarian Jews were one of the last groups from Central Europe to be deported en masse to the Nazi death camps courtesy of their recalicitant pro-Nazi government.  By the time the deportations got going, it was close to the end of the war which meant a couple things.  First, Hungarian Jews stood a better chance of surviving their ordeal because it started it much later than it did for German or Polish Jews.  Second, the later the war progressed, the more important it became for the Germans to extract free labor from the camp inmates, which led to a rough set of checks and balances and impetus other than wholesale extermination.  

  One fact that emerges time and time again from Holocaust lit is the dynamic where a trainload of folks shows up at a concentration camp and there is an immediate cull, some are sent directly to the gas chambers and others are sent to the work camps.  This is, for example, what happened to Sophie in the book Sophie's Choice: she is allowed to keep one of her two children during the initial cull.   Thus, the amount of gassing is directly related to the frequent arrival of new trainloads of undesirables.   In the absence of new arrivals the concentration camp experience was closer to your garden-variety 20th century totalitarian work camp: terrible conditions but also a desire at some level for the inmates to work productively at something. 

   This then, is a book about working at a concentration camp, and it is memorable because Debreczeni has a background in journalism and an eye for detail.  I'll never think about underwear the same ever again.

The Origins of the Irish (2013) by J.P. Mallory

 Book Review

The Origins of the Irish (2013)

by J.P. Mallory

  I was in Ireland over the break and finally, on my third visit, made it to somewhere outside of Dublin (Cork and Belfast).  That got me thinking about the origins of the Irish people.  It's an interesting subject largely because of the status of the Irish language as one of the linguistic fringes of the Indo-European family of languages, which covers pretty much every language between India (Hindu) to Ireland that isn't Arabic.  Most laypeople could tell you that the ancient Irish were "the Celts," but as Mallory, a Professor in linguistics with a specialization in the roots of Indo-European languages, frequently opines, "the Celts" don't really mean anything in scholarly terms. 

   Historical genetics has also taken a huge leap in the years since The Origins of the Irish- Mallory mentions this in two post-scripts to the revised version which was published in 2017, but even since then advances have been made.  Mallory, who spent his professional life at Queen's University in Belfast, marshals the archeological evidence in chapters that make up most of the book.  After archeology he turns to genetics, then "self-reported" evidence from the Irish themselves before wrapping up with linguistic evidence.  

   He reports that archeologists pinpoint a transition between the mesolithic (stone age/hunters and gatherers) and neolithic (farming) populations, that tracks with changes found across Europe.  Specifically, that a population flowed from Anatolia through Southern Europe and Spain up to Ireland, and that this population genetically displaced the previous population.  This second group also began to build monumental architecture (think Stonehenge) and introduced prestige burials to the area.  Mallory observes that this group is genetically significant to Ireland but that the time horizon doesn't match up with any evidence supporting the language of Irish, so it is unlikely that the neolithic immigrants were "Irish" in that sense.

    Rather, Mallory posits an introduction of the Irish language to the growth of "hill-forts" which are also found in parts of central Europe during early Celtic migration periods.  He also argues that burials and objects found that are linked to horses and chariots are likely to support the introduction of the Irish language, probably from Scotland or the area surrounding the Isle of Man.  He concludes that the introduction of the Irish language is not linked to any genetic shift in the population, but either represents a linguistic shift brought about by a new elite or by a group that was genetically similar to the earlier, non-Irish speaking population.

The New Jim Crow (2010) by Michelle Alexander

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times)

The New Jim Crow (2010)

by Michelle Alexander

#69

    The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is the 55th of the 100 books I've read from the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list.  As a criminal defense attorney who has spent over 20 years practicing in state and federal criminal court,  I am intimately familiar with every argument that Alexander made AND which of those arguments have succeeded AND I also have opinions about her arguments have harmed the Democratic party in recent national elections.   Alexander presents a blue-print for the racial justice portion of the post-George Floyd era and personally, I'm pretty convinced that some of the arguments in here helped Trump to victory.

   Alexander's main thesis is that the mass incarceration that followed the declaration of the "war on drugs" is the New Jim Crow: A race based system of government sponsored control aimed mostly at young, African-American males.  It's an argument that should sound familiar, because it has won the day here in California and made inroads at the Federal level.  Both the California state government and the Federal government have adopted many of the easy fixes that Alexander proposes.   However the deeper cuts of Alexander's arguments expose how (and I say this as someone who supports and agrees with much of what she says) very Un-American the structural underpinnings of her arguments can be.

  I'll share two examples.  The first is the argument that she makes late in the book that the success of Barack Obama and his election as President is harmful to the cause of racial justice because it promotes racial exceptionalism and allows racists to claim that there isn't a race problem in the United States.  Even if Alexander is right, that is a terrible argument to make in support of her many common-sense policy positions.  Can you imagine trying to argue to a swing state voter in suburban Philadelphia or semi-rural Wisconsin that the success of individuals like Barack Obama is a problem that needs to be addressed?  You'd sound like a lunatic.

   The second example is Alexander's lengthy explanation of how the racism of the criminal justice system operates despite the explicit bar to overtly racist laws in the United States.  I'm not saying she's wrong, only that this is a terrible argument that has helped Donald Trump win over potential democratic voters.   It's a bad argument because like many arguments inspired by Marxism, it attempts to convince the listener/reader that the truth is the exact opposite of what the reader believes to be the truth.  It's a heavy tactic in Marxist inspired persuasion that goes right back to the beginning, or close to it, specifically the idea of "false consciousness" i.e. the idea that the duty of Marxist intellectuals to convince the working-class/proletariat that everything they believe about their lives under capitalism is wrong.    Think of how that dovetails with the failed Democratic attempts in the most recent Presidential election to brow-beat swing state voters into fearing Donald Trump as an existential threat to democracy.   Liberal, wealthy democrats telling middle and working class white Americans what to think is never going to win.

  Alexander also obscures a broader, more succesful theme that Trump himself has impressed- which is that law enforcement is petty and vindictive and over-reaches all the time.   This argument is present in Alexander's facts, but she is more interested in the racists implications of over-policing instead of focusing on how over-policing sucks for everyone, poor black guys in the South and Donald Trump as well.  Get the cops off our backs is a winner.

The Looming Tower (2006) by Richard Wright

 New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century(#55)

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)

by Richard Wright

   The Looming Tower is a non-fiction account of the "road to 9-11."  It landed at #55  on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list and unsurprisingly it isn't a very popular Audiobook.  I did find the story interesting, specifically the way Al-Qaeda arose from a bunch of stuff that had literally nothing to do with the United States- the Egyptian repression of Islamists that led to the further radicalization of the incarcerated, the history of Saudi Arabia and the role of Bin Laden's dad in developing the infrastructure of that country and of course the fervent US support of the very same Jihadis who became our worst enemies after 9/11 but were our friends during the war in Afghanistan.

  Another theme that emerges is just how kooky Bin Laden and his obsession with hitting the United States were in the context of the global movement for jihad.  Many of Bin Laden's own people thought he was out to lunch and other US targets:  The Taliban and Saddam Hussein to name two, were only peripherally involved and on-board with Bin Laden's dramatic plans.   The other side of the coin is Wright's investigation of the failure of United States intelligence to disrupt and prevent 9/11.  Here, I was reading as a criminal defense attorney who knows a lot about law enforcement and I finished The Looming Tower with the conviction that, yes, more could have been done particularly in the area of collaboration between the FBI and CIA which was prevented for some reason I still don't understand.  On the other hand, it's hard to prevent an attack that no one had even conceptualized before it happened.   Wright is able to point to scattered foreshadowing but there really was very little to hone on before the attacks occurred.

  

Frederick Douglass (2018) by David W. Blight

 Audiobook Review

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)

by David W. Blight

   Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight is another pick from the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Time (#86).  I'm also looking for non-fiction titles to round out my fiction heavy reading list, and the Times list has plenty of non fiction titles.  Even within the non fiction world, "great man" biographies aren't my favorite, but Frederick Douglass strikes me as a worthy candidate, since he is the first African-American, chronologically speaking, who would merit this treatment under any "great man" type theory of history. This is as compared to the "ordinary man"/annales school of history which focuses on normal folks, in which case there are many possible candidates for the honor.

   I knew nothing about Douglass beyond the bare biographical details of his life: Born a slave in Western Maryland, he learned to read and write at a young age and then fled slavery to the north as a young man, where he became known as a strong and urgent voice for the end of slavery. As the book reveals, he spent most of his life on lecture tours although in the post Civil War era he assumed several government positions, including being the US Marshall for Washington DC and as an envoy to Haiti- the only sinecure for African-American diplomats in the world at the time.  The Audiobook runs 36 hours, and it is easy to imagine the exact same story as a work of fiction- any individual who charts a career path as an "orator" as Douglass did- in an era before amplification of the human voice- is bound to have a flair for the dramatic in his personal and professional life.  

  For most of his life- and certainly the early pre-Civil War part, Douglass worked closely with white abolitionists, who were both his sponsors and his audience. These relationships were often fraught with issues of financial dependency, and it's hard to not to see Douglass' desire to emancipate both African-American slaves AND himself from white partners as a double theme of the book through the end of the civil war.  Beyond his work as an advocate, Douglass was one of the first (the first?) African-Americans to travel the world (American and Europe anyway) and his biography also does justice to those impressions.  For example, there are at least a dozen descriptions of Douglass encountering racial segregation on trains and boats- including the detail that when he was appointed as the American envoy to Haiti he had to find a new ship to take because the captain of the first ship refused to transport blacks and whites together. 

   After the Civil War, Douglass' legacy is a mixed bag: He was there when the Freedman's Bank- a post Civil War financial institution designed to help newly freed slaves obtain financial independence- collapsed, taking the savings of many of its (black) patrons.  He also advocated for the annexation of Haiti and other Caribbean and Central American polities and generally served as an apologist/advocate for American colonization. Finally, after his long suffering wife died, Douglass married a white lady. which, again, was close to being a unique circumstance at the time.

  His family doesn't come off particularly well. Douglass felt a strong obligation to support his children and their children, but none them amounted to anything, and a few were out and out failures.   

The Power Broker: Volume 1 (1974) by Robert Caro

 Audiobook Review

The Power Broker: Volume 1 (1974)

Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

by Robert Caro

Read by Robertson Dean

(2011)

   Lists like the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America and 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die commonly keep fiction and non-fiction books separate.  For example, in the two lists I just cited, there are zero works of non fiction.  At least with the 1,001 Novels project the bias is in the title, but the 1,001 Books list has no excuse.   One recent list to buck this separation is the recently published New York Times Top Books of the 21st Century, which combines fiction and non-fiction.   Such an approach might have benefited the 1,001 Novels project.   You can see why if you listen to the Audiobook of The Power Broker: Volume 1, which is just about as New York a book as one could possibly imagine.  Indeed, there is an argument that its inclusion is required if a reader wants to really know New York, city and state.  No single person has had a greater impact on how the entire state LOOKS than Moses.   

  Volume 1, which lasts 22 hours in Audiobook format, handles his rise, and takes us to the cusp of his monumental bridge, tunnel and freeway building projects that remade Manhattan in his image.  We learn that Moses came from a patrician upbringing- a key element of his success is that he never needed to make money from his work and that his vision was inspired by the idea of a non-partial bureaucratic technocrat, who overcame all obstacles to benefit "the people."  Caro presents it as an idea he came up with while he was doing post-graduate studies in Oxford University, and his school-child dreams of a core of highly disciplined, uncorruptible state employees was about as far from the facts on the ground in New York City as could be possible.

   After some early career missteps, he was rescued from obscurity by a friendship with Belle Moskowitz, a reformer and early supporter of future Governor of New York Al Smith.  Moskowitz recommended Robert Moses to Smith as a man who could get things done, as someone who could help Smith implement the progressive ideas he wanted to advance to distance himself from the Tammany Hall political machine from which he sprang and get him in the running for a run at President.  Smith and Moses were an odd couple to be sure, and the depiction of their friendship is the unquestionable highlight of the book.   

   In Volume 1, most of the action is stage setting, as Moses begins to develop his vision of parks and freeways to drive to those parks.  Most of the action takes place on the tip of Long Island, where Moses spent the 20's and 30's in endless litigation with the land barons who owned all the property out there.  Parks were really popular with the general public and the press, particularly when those standing in the way are wealthy captain of industry.  It's clear both from the action of the book and Caro's relentless foreshadowing that the combination of power and lack of public accountability would turn Moses into a monster, but by the end of Volume 1 that moment is still on the far-ish horizon.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) by Sadiiya Hartman

 Book Review

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019)

by Sadiya Hartman

New York Times Best Books of the 21st Century, 96

  When the New York Times published their Best Books of the 21st Century last month I was excited to see that they had both Fiction and Non-Fiction, books in translation and books in English and books by both non-American and American authors.  To often lists like this are parochial- "Best American Novels of the 21st Century," for example or they are perversely limited to one TYPE of book- usually the novel, to the exclusion of other forms of literature.   The New York Times list isn't flawless- there is little or no representation of poetry- but overall it's a good mix of fiction and non-fiction, foreign and domestic.  I've read most of the fiction titles but few of the non-fiction picks.

   Hartman writes about the lives of so-called "wayward women" of the American urban core in the early 20th century- almost entirely focusing on African-American women who were judged by the system to be dangerous enough to be sent away to a reformatory for up to three years at a stretch for crimes like having a child out of wedlock or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time coming home from work.  Hartman blends the non-fiction of facts she has gleaned from 20th century court documents with fictionalizations of the women from those documents.

  

 As Hartman repeatedly points out, the oppression in these pages is not hypothetical, but represents decades of actual lives ruined in the name of social progress.  Almost of all the court proceedings she discusses took place without the women being represented by anyone- a lawyer, a social worker, and truly once you were taken into the system, a place would be made for you.   Hartman also convincingly makes the point that many of these women were the direct inspiration for the American popular culture that emerged from the jazz age.   Women like Zelda Fitzgerald became  immortal icons, while the black-girls who inspired her went to the reformatory (and Zelda also got institutionalized, let's not forget.)

  

The Hasheesh Eater (1857) by Fitz Hugh Ludlow

 Book Review

The Hasheesh Eater (1857)

by Fitz Hugh Ludlow

   The Hasheesh Eater is generally considered to be the first book that extols the "drug culture" of America.  Obviously, it was written decades before such a culture actually existed, and was then revived by writers from the Beat Generation and so forth.   To be clear, Ludlow was a fan of "hasheesh" which is a concentrated form of cannabis- not a form of opium.  Despite a professional career in the criminal justice system I was still fuzzy on the distinction going in to The Hasheesh Eater.  Ludlow's frame of reference is assuredly classical in terms of his subjective experience- the hallucinations and so forth.

   The hallucinations he describes sound more like what a modern person what associate with hallucinatory drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca.  He also describes a level of psychological dependence that reads as ridiculous in 2024, more in line with how marijuana was depicted at the height of the War Against Drugs of the 1980's.  Even though we now live in a country where marijuana is legal in half the states (and all the important states) in America it is still hard to imagine the state of  American society BEFORE marijuana prohibition- when marijuana was legal, as was cocaine and opium. 

   

A Visionary Madness (2003) by Mike Jay

Book Review

A Visionary Madness (2003)

by Mike Jay

   I heard about this book on Instagram, via an account of an academic I follow.  Despite widespread acceptance of the idea that the internet makes everything available forever, this simply isn't proving to be the case.  A good example is the journalism written during the internet era for outlets like Vice Media or the Gawker blog family.  All that stuff is just gone.  I've observed this interesting dynamic between the operation of copyright upon the ability of audiences to spread a given work vs. the dynamic of public domain materials which conversely effects the ability of publishers to generate interest in a given work.   This dynamic tracks the release cycle for a specific work, with the former dynamic operating at the beginning and the latter taking over after a certain number of years.

   I mention that because I'd never heard of The Air Loom Gang before I saw it on instagram.  It's a good example of a book that exists as a cult classic, though not a particularly succesful example of that genre.  Jay writes about James Tilly, a real person who lived in the UK (with short trips to France) around the time of the French Revolution.  He showed up in London after said Revolution and demanded an audience with Lord Liverpool and when he was refused he made public accusations that Liverpool was a traitor to the crown.  He claimed he was part of a secret mission to France to broker a peace between the UK and revolutionary France.

 At Lord Liverpool's request, he was committed to the then new insinuation of the insane asylum, known as Bedlam where he spent the next couple decades loudly proclaiming his sanity.   The book delves into the nature of his madness, which is revealed as the first technologically driven episode of paranoid-schizophrenia.  He makes this argument because Tilly claimed to be the victim of a secret influencing machine that was hidden below the streets of London.  He sketched the device, which was equally intricate and insane.  As Jay makes clear, Tilly was insane, but in a very interesting way.  It's a book that deserves to be on any shelf where Discipline and Punishment by Michel Foucault resides but I'm pretty sure finding a hard copy outside a library is rough.

River of Shadows (2003) by Rebecca Solnit

 Book Review

River of Shadows: 

 Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003)

by Rebecca Solnit

   This is going to sound crazy, but I actually had the idea to write this exact book, or something like it, then I went and looked to see if anyone had already it, and found that Rebecca Solnit had written precisely the same book I had considered writing, in 2003.  I'd never heard of it before I looked it up after having the same idea myself (20 years later lol), but it won the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism in 2004 as well as some lesser literary awards, so it isn't in any way obscure.

   I had the idea during a recent visit to the important locations of the Modoc War in Northern California/Southern Oregon between several bands of Modoc Native Americans and the United States Army(!) between 1872 and 1873.  During that war, the US Army hired San Francisco photographer and pioneer in the field of moving pictures, Eadweard Muybridge, to document the war, and he came up and took a series of photos.  It was while looking at one of those photos in the Fort Klamath historical site that I had the idea for this exact book that Rebecca Solnit wrote (with the support of a Guggenheim grant!) over 20 years ago.

  Of course, the Modoc War is just a chapter in this much longer book about the intersection of capitalism, photography, the American West and the motion picture business, and Muybridge is involved enough to keep the whole book interesting.  In fact, I'm surprised this book hasn't been turned into a biopic or prestige TV piece- it has the action to support it- including Muybridge murdering his wife's' lover in cold blood, spectacular photography trips all over the western hemisphere and a supporting cast of characters ranging from Leland Stanford to Thomas Edison.

  

The Language Puzzle (2024) by Steven Mithen

 Book Review

The Language Puzzle: Piecing Together the Six-Million Year Story of How Words Evolved (2024)

by Steven Mithen

   If you want to skip reading this book I can give you the ultimate thesis in a nutshell:

  "When you get right down to it, fully modern language got over the hump after humans managed to tame fire, which led to them sitting around a fire at night, and listening to one another talk.  The humans who were the best at telling stories around the campfire did better in the natural selection process and became the leaders of early humanity, leading to the development of modern, human language."

   Mithen really takes the long view- he is very serious about the six million year timeline, if only to emphasis how late in the game what we know as language actually developed.   Mithen pieces his story together using a variety of disciplines that typically operate in silos: archeology, genetics, linguistics and zoology.  His references to modern languages are mostly limited to their use as illustrations of shifts that took place hundreds of thousands of years ago, or deep characteristics of language that have been there from the beginning.  

  Even with the "this is going to be obsolete before its published" disclaimer that all popular authors writing about advances in genetic science give, the chapter related to genetics was particularly intriguing.  I think I had heard that we had managed to sequence a Neanderthals genome, but I certainly didn't know the things Mithen writes about how those differences influenced language development.  I gather, from this and other books, that even post-sequencing DNA genetics remains complicated because the way genes interact is complicated and it is highly unusual that you can trace anything to one exact gene.

I enjoyed the Audiobook because I actually got to hear all the different noises reference in the book instead of having to puzzle everything out on my own.